Popcorn Brings 3D Touch Peek & Pop To iOS 9 App Icons

When jailbreak was finally possible on iOS 9, we knew it was only a matter of time before Cydia tweaks started playing around with the software features exclusive to the latest iPhones. With 3D Touch being the selling point of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, it’s no surprise that it has received the most attention from the jailbreak store.

Apart from the collection of tweaks that let you get 3D Touch features on older iOS 9 devices, there are already more than a couple options on Cydia to spruce up or improve upon said features. A new addition to the latter is Popcorn by Phillip Tennen, which brings the popular Peek and Pop feature to the iOS 9 Home screen.

For those who don’t own an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, or have been out of touch with Apple’s smartphone exploits, “Peek and Pop” is a new 6s-exclusive feature that, coupled with the iPhone duo’s pressure sensitive touchscreen technology, lets users press hard over a link or an email preview to take a quick peek at the underlying content, after which the user can decide to return to the previous screen by letting go or press harder still to “pop” the content into full view.

Officially, this option is restricted to content within apps while the Quick Actions menu is reserved for app icons on the Home screen. Popcorn essentially adds the Peek and Pop option to the latter. With the tweak installed on your iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, once you’ve brought up the Quick Actions menu with a hard-press on an icon, pressing down harder will bring up a smaller, windowed version of the app, which you can then dismiss by tapping the Close button at the bottom. For older devices, the same can be done by simply swiping upwards on an icon. The tweak doesn’t come with any configuration or customization options at the moment.

The tweak isn’t exactly a Peek and Pop clone in that it doesn’t provide you with a preview of the app – the windowed app is fully functional – and you can’t seamlessly switch from peek to pop, that is, you can’t make the app go from windowed to full-screen. Of course, all that has more to do with the nature of its usage more than the tweak itself – peeking at an app won’t really do you much good, but then neither will windowed apps that don’t open any faster than if they were launched the regular way.

If you’re expecting to get snappier navigation or an increase in productivity out of this tweak, you’re likely to be disappointed, but only because that’s not what the tweak seems to have been designed to do. Popcorn, in its current form, is more of a “because I can” tweak – a fun gimmick, but one based on a cool, neatly implemented concept.

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